Digital Camera Reviews Overview Epson PhotoPC 550 AGFA EPhoto 307 Canon Powershot 350 Casio QV 700 Kodak DC200 Olympus D-320L Ricoh RDC-300Z Sony Mavica FD5

By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 27, 1998; Page N40

We got used to the idea of words living in our computers a long time ago, so what about pictures?

There are good reasons why we converted our typewriters into kitschy office decor. It's so much easier to compose, revise and reproduce our thoughts when they exist as bits of data than when they're confined to ink on paper. And words are very computer-friendly: They don't take any space to store and they're a snap to bounce around the world in e-mail or over the Web.

Pictures, however, have remained stubbornly analog for most people. For a long time, the devices needed to get images into a computer, scanners or digital cameras, cost a ton, were difficult to use and, in the case of digital cameras, took lousy pictures to boot. (The cheapest digital camera we could find in our April 1996 feature on the subject was $500; most of the hardware being sold then ranged from $650 to $1,000.)

And doing anything with those pictures once you had somehow captured them on your computer demanded (at the time) obscene amounts of processing power, memory and disk space.

Now that is changing, slowly, with numerous mistakes and false starts along the way. Scanners have almost instantly become simple commodity items, stacked up on store shelves and selling for under $150. Even sub-$1,000 PCs pack as much processing power as the workstations once wielded only by the pros.

Color printers have seen an even more dramatic price drop, coupled with astonishing improvements in image quality. And those digital cameras are finally starting to cost less, weigh less and even deliver decent pictures. (Not that they're exactly cheap yet; at $400 and up for a decent digital camera, digital imaging is still a dubious proposition for many people. So we also looked at a much cheaper option: getting image files of your photos returned on a disk with your conventional prints.)

This is our attempt to make sense of all this, starting with the assumption that pictures belong in an electronic form right along with your words. We know that if we could keep all our pictures as digital files, life would be easier, a hard drive with a 'Find' command beats a shoebox full of old photos when it comes to locating that picture of No Name, Colorado from the cross-country drive in 1992.

And wouldn't it help to fix those annoying little glitches in pictures, the tree branch in the foreground, Mom's flash-induced red eyes, the tilted horizon caused by a moment's lack of balance? (For that matter, it's not that hard to lie outright with 'enhanced' digital images.) And we'd love to be able to create photo albums in some easily sharable digital format, one that would allow us to put them online, e-mail them or just print them out. (See the box at right for examples of what FFWD readers are doing with their digital images.)

There's one other reason, we think, why digital imaging can become a mass medium: It's not like analog cameras are that much more idiot-proof than the digital kind. Speaking as people who regularly manage to blaze away with our Nikons without remembering to load the film first, this may be the one place where computerization can actually make things easier.